Udacity Review

What is Udacity?

Udacity is an online source for learning tech skills that are on demand nowadays. They offer various courses with a focus on programming, artificial intelligence, and data science.

How Udacity Works

This provider offers a list of tech programs that are project-based which means that you gain the skills by practicing on real cases from businesses. To see what the program includes, proceed on the course page itself and read the syllabus. Each program takes about 3-4 months of learning with about 5-7 hours per week on average.

What each client gets is a custom learning plan and a technical mentor who gives you unlimited feedback. Also, Udacity is constructed in a way that a customer has a flexible learning path and, what is the best, a student studies on real-world projects by leading companies.

After the payment, you got about 3-5-month access to all the course content – so you need to finish all the assignments by this time.

How much does Udacity cost?

The company’s pricing model is built on the monthly payment base which is $399 per month. As a result, the total cost of the nanodegree program is equal to $399 * the course duration (399 * 3 months = $1197).

As an illustration, the Full Stack Web Developer program (4-month program) costs $1356 with a $15 discount that is available today.

Also, Udacity offers almost 200 free courses on their website.

Additionally, you find a coupon and get a 15-50% discount. Right now, Udacity has a COVID-19 discount which means you can have a one-month free trial for all nanodegree programs.

Udacity Features

Udacity has a section with unique courses that are presented only by this company. Among such are Deep Learning, Robotics Software Engineer, and Self-Driving Car Engineer programs.

So, as you have already understood, the company basically has two types of courses, free and paid. Paid courses are deep ones, and they are called ‘nanodegree programs’. On average, it takes about half of a year to complete such a path and you get a certificate after.

Free courses are some topics covered that are parts of nanodegree programs.

Also, on the page of each course, you can find its duration, price, syllabus, the due time to enroll and prerequisites, the skills that you should have in order to get the best outcome.

Udacity Deep Learning

This program is a unique feature by Udacity where a person can gain knowledge in artificial intelligence and learn to build deep neural networks. Those skills would be helpful for image recognition and generation, building models, conducting time-series prediction and more similar tasks. During the program, the PyTorch framework will be used.

The program takes 4 months to complete and costs $1356. Among the instructors are the Machine Learning Engineer who previously has worked in Google, graduates from Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, and others.

Notice that before enrolling, you should have basic working knowledge of Python.

Udacity Python

If you are interested in programming with Python, there are several options on Udacity.

For the beginners, there is a free course Introduction to Python Programming which takes about 5 weeks to finish. It includes five lessons with a theoretical part and quizzes. This course is included in Data Analyst, a nanodegree program.

This Data Analyst program requires you to have Python and SQL skills and lasts 4 months with approximately 10 hours per week with a student’s active participation. The price is $1356 for the course. During this program, you will learn how to work with complex datasets using Python libraries like NumPy and Pandas.

Udacity Data Science

One more program that allows you to apply your Python knowledge is Data Science. This option helps students to gain skills in running data pipelines, building models, creating and analyzing A/B test results. As the final task, you will be required to design your own open-ended Data Science project.

Overall, the program requires you to spend about 10 hrs/week for 4 months and costs $1356.

Udacity Machine Learning

This program will allow you to gain knowledge in building trained models and testing them. To polish your skills, you will have a project where you will work with Amazon SageMaker models.

Among the instructors are Google’s former Machine Learning Engineer, Data Scientist at Nerd Wallet, the graduate from Yale and others.

The course lasts 3 months and costs $1017.

Here are some more programming courses.

Udacity Java is designed to provide a student within 4 months with the main concepts of back-end development with this language as well as the most-used Java frameworks and other tools like Spring Boot, Rest API, MySQL, MongoDB.

One of the most popular programs is C++, where you can learn all from the basics to concepts such as object-oriented programming, memory management, and concurrency. In the end, you will need to build your own application using C++.

There is also a broader program like Full Stack Web Development where you can grasp both front- and back-end development skills in 4 months.

Udacity Marketing Programs

If you are not feeling like programming is what you need, there are also a number of programs related to business. Among them is Marketing.

Udacity Reviews

In a nutshell, the reviews are positive with some complaints on high pricing and poor support. Udacity is rated 4.8 / 5 on Trustpilot. On Reddit, there is a higher number of negative reviews and those ones question the quality of the content as well. Also, one user on Reddit says that some mentors are previous nanodegree students that means they often do not provide customers with in-depth feedback or do not help to self an issue.

Alternatives

Now, it’s time to talk about the alternatives and compare Udacity with companies that offer similar services.

Udemy vs Udacity

Those providers have differently structured e-learning processes. Udemy offers bunches of courses on almost any topic from different instructors with the duration and course structure that really vary. Meanwhile, Udacity has a limited long-term program list called Nanodegrees.

One more aspect is that Udacity has a focus on practical skills while Udemy often focuses on theoretical skills. Also while Udacity offers many useful perks like mentorship and feedback from professionals (this is not what Udemy offers), it’s much more costly (the price is almost 1000 times higher). One more thing is that Udemy has a one-time payment per course while Udacity requires you to pay each month. However, both providers are built in a way that a student has self-path learning opportunities.

Udacity vs Coursera

The duration and learning path is something both Udacity and Coursera have in common. Also, both companies allow you to enroll in a full program as well as in a single course. Furthermore, those two providers give you a certificate after the completion (but on Coursera you need to pay an extra fee for this).

As for the differences, instructors on Udacity are highlighted as professionals from the business world, while Coursera offers a kind of university courses where instructors work at universities.

As for the price, Coursera offers course-based pricing while there is a monthly payment on Udacity that makes the second provider more expensive.

Is Udacity worth it?

This question is up to every person to answer for themselves. We see no reason, except for the high price, why you should not try it. However, from our perspective, Udacity programs seem good if you’re thinking about switching to a new occupation or looking to gain knowledge in some less commercially offered field like deep learning; if you need some kind of “quick” knowledge, it could be better to buy a course on some websites like Udemy.

6.5Total Score

The price is the question

Price can be too high when there are many cheaper competitors offering the same services.